


Fatale

by anythingbutgrief



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Angst, Film Noir, M/M, Sexual Content, a damn mess, just like the show itself hi-yooooo (rimshot), unspecific timeline??????????
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 21:20:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1617449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutgrief/pseuds/anythingbutgrief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It struck him that his face looked younger than his body would suggest, all clear shining pale skin and wide green eyes and dark pink mouth. The dancer had the face of a schoolboy and the body of a white-hot flame, dancing toward him so fluidly Mickey didn’t have the time to be nervous." Film noir AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fatale

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dirtywings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtywings/gifts).



> Warnings for mentions of child abuse and hate crimes and descriptions of sexual content, violence, and gore.

The city smelled like blood. It had been raining for days, maybe even weeks, but it seemed to Mickey that the pavement would never be clean, never washed away of the stains soaked in. It was to be expected, the stench. It was not commented on. Mickey supposed that was fine with him. It was his job, anyway, finding the blood that others ignored, and ignoring whatever blood came after he reported what he knew. This city was perfect for him, and he for it, sitting in his office with his head tossed back, looking out upside-down into the gray day through his open window.

“Laying down on the job as usual.”

Mickey lifted his chin high enough to see the source of the voice without straightening his body yet. “You offering a job?”

The man in the sharp suit, his shirt as impossibly white as ever, didn’t look amused. “I’m _assigning_ you one.”

“Look, the last case you put me on was a pain in the ass, so if I’m going to keep doing this for you, I’m gonna need more money for it. Like twice the money. At least.”

“You’ll take what I give you.”

Mickey sat up then and glared at the man, the pretentious bastard who had the balls to go by “Mr X” as if he were anywhere mysterious enough to warrant it, as if Mickey hadn’t been able to track down his real name two days after meeting him. Not that X knew that part. “If you want a bargain deal, take your shit to the cops.

“Cops can’t know about this. No one can.” X walked to the desk and slid a folder over to Mickey. “Get it done.”

Mickey flipped through the pages, recognizing the broad, plastic-looking politician faces even in black and white. “Mayor’s son?”

“ _No_. Son of a friend of a friend of the mayor’s family, as far as you’re concerned, one who stayed with the mayor during the summertime because our mayor is a kind man who takes kindly to poor kids, and even that’s saying too much.”

Mickey sifted through school photographs of the kid, single portraits and group photos, pictures with his mother, pictures of him in a suit on a field trip, pictures of him standing just within the gates of the mayor’s mansion, three or four other boys with the same wide face and small eyes grinning for the camera. Mickey moved on, picking up the paper in the middle of the stack to wave it impatiently in the air, causing X to grimace and gesture toward the open window. “This says kid’s been gone three weeks. Why’re you only bringing me this now?”

“He’s gotten lost before, apparently, but returned soon enough. Not this time.”

Mickey flipped through the pages and landed on a particularly colorful photograph in the second half of the folder, track marks on the boy’s arm prominent in his flesh like streets carved out of soil. “Whew, okay. So you’re telling me not only has the mayor got a secret bastard kid, he’s a junkie?”

“Would you lower your damn voice? Believe me, the river of shit that would flow if this got out is darker than you know. You do not want to be caught in it if it happens. Find him.”

Mickey leveled X with a blank stare until the guy retreated out of his office, then drew the blinds and picked up his phone, dialing out a number from memory. “Hey, Benny, I need you to get a list of addresses for me. Last name of Shapiro,” Mickey said into the phone, reading the name out of a caption on a photo of debate teammates from the kid’s high school yearbook. This girl had her arm around the missing bastard’s shoulders, the two of them smiling wide while the others in the line kept their distance. “Yeah, I know there’s a lot with that last name, asshole, just go down the list and tell me which ones go with which first names.” Chances are, the girl would be married by now, anyway, and Mickey would have to find a new place to start the trail, and the entire list of addresses would go to waste, but either way he had to keep what Benny knew to an absolute minimum. The guy wasn’t that crafty but he was nosy, and anyone that eager to trade information with Mickey likely wasn’t that scrupulous about keeping his damn mouth shut to whoever else came asking. There were three Elizabeth Shapiros in the state, one in this city. It was worth a shot.

The strategy was the same as ever: scope, follow, “meet.” Mickey checked the mailbox in the building to verify the name was right, sat on the opposite end of the street until he saw the woman from the photograph walk in, waited until she walked out, and followed her as quietly as possible to her location. Mickey waited until she had been in the bar forty minutes before slipping inside, sitting on the opposite end from her, and going through three rounds of whiskey himself, watching the bar empty out around them. The atmosphere in the bar felt limp, drained, like everyone had come to be lulled asleep, the men and women within leaving not in pairs but one by one, drowsily out into the night toward their beds. The place felt desolate and dusty now. Even better, Mickey thought. Less ears around. He finally slid to the end of the bar, waving at the bartender. “Another for the lady,” he directed before turning to the girl. “Sorry to bother you, miss, but I think I’ve known you before.”

Betty Shapiro looked as sober as a librarian, even as far gone as she was, and stared at Mickey with no amusement in his face. He knew the genteel act was probably a push too far; even working as long as he did using fake names and fake jobs, it was hard to cover up his accent with any believability, so he just didn’t bother trying anymore. “I doubt that very much,” she said coolly after a moment, not even glancing at the drink the bartender had slid down their way.

“Joe! Fred’s friend. From high school. You don’t remember me?”

She just stared at him.

“Well, I don’t blame you, face like mine. You and Fred still hanging out? You two were close in school. He and I just started meeting up again recently. I meant to ask him if he ever hitched himself to Betty.”

The lady looked almost offended at that. “Me and Fred? No.”

“Why not?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I wasn’t interested, and neither was he,” she said, squaring up her shoulders like she was building a spiky force-field.

“Was there somebody else?”

“Is that your way of coming onto me, _Joe_?” Her eyes were hard and dark and cold like old pennies, and Mickey thought that if he were straight he’d be terrified of how little she hesitated to reject him.

“No, no, I assure you, Bets,” he said, smiling at the scowl on her face at the nickname. “But about Fred. I….I haven’t seen him in a while. We were supposed to meet up for lunch a few days ago, and….well, I don’t know. Worried about him. If he has a girlfriend I could try to come into contact with or—”

Betty pursed her lips, turned to look down at the drink, and started running her thumb and first finger thoughtfully along the rim of the glass. “No girlfriend. He was interested in someone, though, I think. I don’t know for sure. But he’d never shut up about it.”

“You know who?”

“We didn’t talk as much as we used to, me and Fred. I try to not to hang out with people who….I try not to hang out with people who do the things that he did. If you saw him recently like you say you did, I trust you know what I’m referring to. He’d show up on my doorstep, though, sometimes, wrecked out of his mind, and I couldn’t very well leave him there to die, drowning on my stoop with his mouth wide open and his body barely covered in the rain like a fool.” She shook her head, cleared her throat. “He used to talk about this redhead dancer he used to hang out with a lot. Vines, I think, it was. That’s the name of the club he’d go to.”

“I think I’ll look into that. Thanks.” Mickey tossed a few bills onto the bar next to her, and added when she raised her brows in question. “For old time’s sake.” It was simple enough to track down from there.

***

Vines had an aura of smoke thicker than Mickey’s apartment, dim orange and blue lights lining the place and making everything seem less real, less solid than they must have been. Onstage a lady in a dress so skimpy it could be fairly described as negligee crooned off-key, but there was a crowd of men staring up adoringly at her like she was Mary come again. There was a dancer braced on every other table, moving slowly and sensually to the beat of the blues coming out onstage, and Mickey flinched with the realization that they weren’t all women. He felt himself start to sweat already, lines of it trickling down from his hairline under his shirt. Better to get out of here as quickly as possible, before somebody saw him, before somebody who knew somebody who knew his family. He saw a waitress holding an empty tray walking past him, and stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

“Excuse me, is there a redheaded dancer who works here often?” She nodded. “Here tonight?”

“Behind you, to your left,” the lady said with a wink.

Mickey turned and saw red hair so bright he couldn’t understand how he hadn’t seen it the second he waked into the building. The redhead had his back turned to Mickey but he could tell he was a tall man, with sturdy shoulders and muscular legs peeking out of his tiny uniform.

Mickey considered interrupting his current conversation, but waited for the man to turn around instead and meet his eyes himself. It struck him that his face looked younger than his body would suggest, all clear shining pale skin and wide green eyes and dark pink mouth. The dancer had the face of a schoolboy and the body of a white-hot flame, dancing toward him so fluidly Mickey didn’t have the time to be nervous.

But he more than made up for that a second later, when the boy was standing in front of him, crookedly smiling at him and staring at him with heavily lined eyes. Mickey’s throat felt like it was closed up. “You lost?”

"I expected a dame," Mickey admitted.

The kid nodded, smile not slipping. "Disappointed?"

Mickey huffed out a laugh, and the coy smile on the boy's face spread into a grin that looked dumber, goofier, more genuine, and it made Mickey's stomach flutter, then turn. The kid's eyes twinkled with something other than mischief, and it felt at once less performed and more inscrutable. Mickey finally tore his eyes away, glancing over both shoulders at the clump of men behind them, some waving dollars at the girls in the sparkly skirts, others pointing meaningful looks in the direction of the men in shorts. Some doing both. "I just.....Surprised. Never been here before." _Another level to the “river of shit” Mr. X’s so worried about_ , Mickey thought. _Bastard junkie faggot son._

"And yet I can tell you've been working in this city for a while,’ the boy said, snapping Mickey’s attention back in place.

"How d'ya know?" 

"I can always see that kinda thing. The city fits on you tighter than your clothes do. All this time and you've never seen this side? Shame."

"Yeah, I guess it is," Mickey said, chewing his lip and staring back at the boy's unbroken gaze. That should be enough to get the message across. Not that Mickey knew why he cared if this dancer knew he was gay. This was a business visit, after all. But maybe it could help kindle trust, anyway. _A little queer solidarity might open this guy's lips_ , Mickey thought.

Wait. Shit. Not like that.

The boy's smile returned to that teasing smirk, eyebrows lifting the slightest centimeter as if he saw exactly what was going through Mickey's mind, sending his insides swimming. Mickey had to fucking speak before he lost the mission entirely. “I, uh, I was told about this place by this girl I know, because this kid named Fred had been chatting it up. And, I, uh, I’m looking for him.” Mickey didn’t know why he couldn’t come up with a better lie than that, why he opened his mouth and something dangerously close to truth came slithering out.

But the boy’s expression changed at those words, as he lifted his gaze to glance over Mickey's head, eyes flitting from one direction to another. "Looks like my boss is getting antsy. I'll need to move on if you're not interested in my services."

Mickey felt his blood rush hotly to his neck, and he wondered if his blush was visible under the club's dim lighting. "Is there, uh, is there a more private place where we can talk about what you offer?" Mickey inwardly winced at himself as soon as the words left his mouth. He needed to get information out of this guy, not stutter out come-ons like he'd never spoken to a human before.

The dancer nodded and reached for Mickey's wrist. Mickey jerked away immediately and felt himself flush deeper at his reaction, but the boy only met his eyes for a moment, his expression calm and apparently unbothered, then nodded in the direction of the private booths tucked into the depths of the club behind him before turning to walk that way. Mickey followed.

Mickey was still embarrassed for flinching by the time they reached the booth at the far end of the place, fishing for his wallet and holding bills out to the kid. "One second," the dancer murmured, looking in both directions before grabbing a sign from within the neighboring booth and hanging it on the doorknob. Occupied. The boy opened the door to their own chosen booth and pulled out the same sign to hang on the knob, gesturing with his hand for Mickey to enter the booth before shutting the door behind them. "No one will risk trying to sit in the next booth to listen with that sign up," the boy whispered, finally taking Mickey's bills and stuffing them in his waistband without counting.

Mickey took a seat. "This something you do a lot, talking to private dicks?"

The dancer smoothly and expertly straddled Mickey's lap so quickly it almost knocked the air out of his lungs. "I'm used to talking to people who would rather not have their conversations heard, in general."

"They know you're willing to talk to the first detective that waves money in your face?"

Mickey saw the lines in his face go hard, his eyes going cold. "I haven't given you any information yet, have I?" At that, the boy started to grind, moving in tiny little circles on his lap. Mickey's fingers itched, and he wasn't sure whether it would be more awkward to keep them laying on his side, out of reach, or if he should grab the guy by the hips. "Freddie wasn't just any other client. If he was, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

So, "Freddie" was special, huh? Mickey felt something hot coil in his stomach at the thought, and it wasn't just the result of the hard body pushing and pulsing against him, although, yeah, that probably had a lot to do with it. "You were sleeping with him?"

He felt the dancer's breath hit his neck as he scoffed. " _Please_. Freddie was shakier than an addict holding a switchblade. He didn't come here to get fucked. He came here to talk. He was.....scared." The boy slowed his hips, but kept moving as he spoke. "He was scared out of his mind and he didn't know where to go."

Mickey finally lifted a hand to still the dancer. "Hey, look, you can take a breather and just talk. You don't gotta dance for the money, too."

The boy paused, looking down from his height into Mickey's eyes, as if he were sizing him up. This close, he could see that his lashes were red, too. Deep, dark red blinking against green. Mickey felt his pulse pound in the fingers still touching the dancer. "Consider it a gift then," the boy finally murmured, hips restarting a rhythm. 

"So what was he scared of?" 

The guy smiled, but without humor. "Name it. Afraid of bald men, afraid of men in hats, men in black. Said they were coming to kill him. He was afraid of walking the streets alone because they could be waiting to ambush him. He was afraid of driving because he thought every car behind him on the street was waiting to rear-end him into a building. He was afraid of cabs because the driver could be hired to kill him. He was afraid of the rain, said there was chemicals in it, poisoning his mind and making him see things that weren't there." The boy made a sound approximating laughter, but cold and sad. "That one freaked me out the least. At least then he _knew_ he was paranoid."

"You think he was making it all up?"

"I don't know what to think," the boy said, stilling again, this time avoiding Mickey's eyes. "All I know is Freddie stopped coming in weeks ago and he must have told people about me." Mickey watched the long pale column of the boy's throat tense as he swallowed. "All I know is he was scared and now he's gone and it's easier for me to think he was making it up than the other thing, because you're not the first person to come asking me about him." 

"I'm not?"

"No. Just the first I haven't lied to."

"What'd these other men look like? You remember?"

"One was tall. Taller than me by maybe two inches. Had a mole on his face the size of Idaho. Was forty-something, maybe. Wore a hat but I could tell his hairline was receding underneath it. Big sausage fingers. The others came as a pair. They thought I didn't notice them walk in together but I did. Pretended not to know each other, because the second one interrupted the first when it was clear he wasn't getting anywhere with me. The first one was my height. Blond hair, mid-thirties maybe. Gap in his front teeth. I could tell by his accent that he wasn't from around here. The second was shorter side of average, maybe an inch taller than you or so. Dark curly hair. As pale as you. Breath stunk like a sewer and he needed to trim his fingernails bad. The first guy, Mole-Face, he just came right out with a picture and asked if I saw him. Blondie was a bit more subtle, chatting me up about my business, asking if any _important people_ ever landed in my lap. Nails told me he came looking for me on a recommendation from his friend Fred. But Freddie didn't have any friends." 

"Seems like he had at least one," Mickey said. The boy met his eyes for a second at that, but looked down after a second, mouth twitching. "A handy one, too. How the hell you remember that much detail, kid?"

"Tricks of the trade." The dancer wiggled his hips again at that, grinning, but Mickey stopped him after a second or two.

"One more question. Why didn't you lie to me, too? How'd you know I wasn't the same as those other men?"

The boy smiled and this time it looked genuine. "Intuition. That's another good trick to have." He swung his legs off Mickey's lap and stood up. "Your time was up a minute ago. Gotta get going, Dick." The boy offered a hand to Mickey to help him up, and this time he didn't flinch. 

"It's Mickey, actually," he said once he got to his feet, hand tingling as it fell away from the kid's as if in protest.

The boy's face lit up at that. "Mickey," he said slowly, as if tasting the name in his mouth. "I'm Ian."

***

Ian. Mickey had expected something more show-y, some obviously fake name. Not that the simplicity of “Ian” made it _real_ , necessarily. If anything, the answer posed a danger on both sides. Real: Ian whose real name is Ian, as sweet and soft and innocent as he sounds when his voice breaks, Ian who’s been surrounded by sharks for weeks, Ian who needs protection. Fake: Ian whose name could be anything else, Ian who knows how sweet and soft and innocent he sounds when his voice breaks, who knows how much it looks like he needs protection. Either way, it landed Mickey into making the rounds in every direction outside of the club, keeping to the shadows, looking for suspicious looking figures entering or exiting.

The street had been empty for several minutes before the door opened again, a fully clothed Ian stepping out and starting off on a brisk pace away from him. Startled, Mickey took off after him, afraid he was going to lose him before he could talk to him again, dropping a hand on his shoulder. Mickey’s hand was immediately pushed off, his body sent stumbling as Ian’s arm swung out to push him away, a hard click interrupting the night silence as Ian cocked something with sure, practiced fingers.

It took a second to register that Ian had actually pulled a gun on him, and that he was holding it steadily, certainly. By the time he had, Ian’s eyes dawned with recognition as he scanned Mickey’s body up and down, and put the gun back into his jacket.

Mickey, still lightheaded, laughed, and it actually felt genuine, not forced. “Jesus, wouldn’t have picked you for the type to have such good form.”

“A lot of people wouldn’t pick me for a lot of things,” Ian said easily, picking up an easy stride and continuing in the direction he was walking before, not objecting when Mickey fell into step beside him.

“You ever actually shoot a gun before?”

“Yes,” Ian replied immediately.

“Ever hit someone with the bullet?”

Ian stopped walking abruptly, turned to face him head-on. “You sure you’re a private dick? You wouldn’t happen to be a cop, would you?”

Mickey felt himself smile and shook his head. “Nah. I wouldn’t fit the brownnosing requirements. Me and authority don’t get along.”

“What about the physical fitness requirements?”

“Oh, ouch. Is that a swipe at my body, pal? The dance was that awful for you?”

Ian kicked a little at Mickey’s foot. “No complaints on this end. Just wondering about your stamina.” At that, Ian took off into a run without warning, and for a brief moment Mickey stared after him, panicked that he’d legitimately frightened him into thinking he was police, but then Ian looked back over his shoulder and laughed, and Mickey felt his feet lurch into motion before his brain could even catch up.

He chased Ian down the alleyway, turned the sharp corner with him out onto the dark and empty street, barely checking for traffic before running after him across to the other side, finally catching up to run alongside him by the time he made it to the sidewalk. They slowed slightly, in sync, turning to look at each other and laugh, even if Mickey had no clue what was funny anymore. He wasn’t sure which one slowed down first, but they both returned to a brisk walk after a minute, flushed and breathing hard and smiling.

“You usually walk home alone?” Mickey asked once he had sufficient breath for speaking. “At this time of night?”

“Yeah, well, the gun comes in handy for that part of the job.”

“All the dancers get a gun, then?”

Ian shrugged. “I’ve had it for a while, since before I started this gig. Not gonna lie, though, I only started loading it again after….you know, Freddie.”

Mickey looked in as many directions as possible, up and down the street, before pulling Ian by the elbow to nestle between a tree and a building. “Look, about that. I don’t know where the kid is, but he’s in deep, and I think…I think it’d be better if I found him before anybody else did. Better for you, too, probably.”

“I really don’t know where he is.”

“No, I know, but I was just wondering if there was anything else. Anything else you want to tell me.”

Ian was silent a moment, clearly debating with himself, but Mickey waited. “He used to talk about this thing…I don’t know what it was, exactly. Called it the Ninth Circle. I assumed he meant it was a place he’d go to shoot up. He kept inviting me out with him, but I told him no. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but I guess I thought that’s where he wanted me to go. I don’t know where it is.”

“Did he describe it to you at all?”

“No. I know he usually hang out downtown. Maybe that’s where it is. But I think he would….I got the impression he would do drugs there and then come to my club. He seemed high most of the time he talked about it. The things I remember him saying seem more like poetry than anything else.”

“He didn’t give you many solid clues?”

Ian offered a sheepish apologetic smile. “Sorry. I’m better at faces than anything else. Should’ve fucking tape-recorded his rambling about it once I started to really worry. He used to say shit like it helped him see all the stars, every last one.”

“No, it helps. Really. Downtown, Ninth Circle. I probably just gotta crack some skulls, see if anybody in the usual rings have heard of it.”

Ian shifted his weight from foot to foot, glanced around at the empty street, and when he spoke he didn’t meet Mickey’s eyes. “Can I---can I come with you? When you crack skulls?”

Mickey stared a moment, then fished out his cigarettes, waving them at Ian when he caught him staring, his gaze locked on them and his mouth gaping open like he was staring at a U.F.O., like he didn’t work in a damn nightclub equal parts sweat and smoke. “You want one?”

“I haven’t in a while, but….”

Mickey put one in Ian’s offered hand, fingertips brushing the barest second, before leaning into his space again with the lighter. “Yeah, you can come along,” he said a minute later, around the smoke in his mouth. “I’ll try to keep the _real_ skull-cracking to a minimum.” Ian’s face broke into a smile so wide it had to hurt, and something swam in Mickey’s gut at the sight. “If you can keep your grinnin’ to a minimum, too. The folks I usually get this kind of information from tend not to respond well to that sort of thing.”

“ _Smiling_ is suspicious? Is laughter dangerous, too?”

Mickey shrugged, even as he thought, _yes, very dangerous, yes._ “They have a very narrow view for what counts as ‘not-suspicious.’”

“I’m sure I can handle it,” Ian said before stubbing out the cigarette with his foot. “I should be getting home, so I’m all well-rested for our snooping tomorrow,” he added, putting a few feet in between their bodies, but his tone was playful, and Mickey gave Ian directions and turned in the opposite direction, only thinking a block down that he should have pretended to walk in the opposite direction, walk with him as far as possible, if only to see where Ian lived. What kind of detective was he?

***

Mickey showed up the next day at their meeting point outside of his regular bar twenty minutes early, hoping to see which direction Ian would come from at least, but he was already standing against a wall, hands in his pockets, when Mickey approached.

“Thanks for helping me,” Mickey said in lieu of a salutation in response to Ian’s familiar wave.

“Yeah, well, I’m a helpful guy.” Ian’s grin was stupidly flirtatious, and a part of Mickey wanted to tell him to knock off the teasing, and the other part wanted him to never stop, wanted to keep soaking in that smile that was like the only spot of sunshine in this entire rain-drenched city.

Mickey bit into his lip to stem his own smile, and cleared his throat. “Look, uh, when we get in there, don’t mention where you work.”

“I got it, we don’t want the trail to heat up for anybody else. It makes sense.”

“Right, but. You’re coming in here as my friend, get it? It’s gotta be believable that we know each other well, to these people, otherwise they’d get suspicious of me having you around ‘cause they know I don’t trust easy.” Mickey felt stupid for saying that last part once the words left his lips, practically telling the kid that he trusted him already, and that it was _special_. Christ.

“Sure, I think I can handle that. They won’t doubt me,” Ian replied with easy confidence, slapping Mickey’s side playfully, as if they’d been pals for years.

“Okay, but what I’m getting at is they…they, uh, can’t know you’re queer. ‘Cause they can’t know that _I_ know, or things’ll get ugly in there quick.”

Ian’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Aren’t _you_ \--?”

“Of course, but,” Mickey cut in, lowering his voice and stepping closer. “That’s the problem. Nobody knows and nobody’s gonna know.”

Ian nodded a few times, sticking his hands back in the pockets of his pants and rocking back and forth on his heels. “Okay, well, let’s get this show on the road then.”

Mickey, a bit surprised Ian accepted that so quickly, realized that he had somehow expected judgment. As if Ian was honesty personified, as if he was such an honest person the idea of associating with a liar would be more repulsive to him than death. “Really? That’s okay with you?”

Ian nodded again. “I got it, man. It’s not like I’m not used to keeping my mouth shut.”

Mickey wanted to feel relief at that, that it wasn’t an issue, but the way Ian said that made him feel uneasy. “Yeah, you do…you do deal with liars for a living, don’t you,” he mused, not really a question. All the rich queers of the city shoving their true selves into a dark sacred corner of a club, baring themselves for one moment for Ian to acknowledge so they could go on their merry way, to function like respected members of society out in the light of day. Mickey felt sick at the thought.

But Ian was smiling at him. “Mickey, I _am_ a liar for a living. I got this, don’t worry.”

Mickey felt himself scowl in response. There was something just unspeakably wrong about Ian identifying himself as a liar, but Mickey couldn’t grasp the words to articulate it, even to himself, so he rolled his eyes and took off walking in the direction of the bar, trusting that Ian would follow behind him.

“Hey there, Billy Boy,” Mickey said as soon as he broke through the front door, with the broadest grin he could manage, watching the look of dread descend onto the pudgy bartender’s body, making him sag like a sponge being squeezed dry. “What’s the news?”

Billy paled but mustered up enough energy to point in the direction of the far end of the bar. “Cavalry came already today,” he muttered out, voice shaking, and Mickey felt himself tense. Sure, he’d dabbled enough in threatening the guy to send him into the shakes before, but as he stepped closer, out of the shadows, he could see the man already sporting a shiner, fingers trembling as he wiped down the glass in his hand. One glance confirmed it, and he knew he didn’t have the time to back away, to slip out unnoticed, because they started to grin and wave him over excitedly, chattering in their rough tones about what a great day it’d been, getting even better already.

Mickey plastered a grin on his face in return and started walking forward, keeping one hand far enough behind him in his stride to try to gesture to Ian to walk out. Wrong place, wrong day. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He hadn’t bothered to scope out the area the way he should have, had spent time at home getting ready first, washing his damn hair, rather than watching the comings and goings of the clientele for hours ahead of time like he normally would have. He got sloppy because he was busy treating the day like a…..like a…

 _Date_? His inner voice mocked, and Mickey wanted to glare as though somebody else had levied the accusation at him.

He could feel more than hear Ian still standing behind him when he approached the table of familiar faces. Mickey didn’t know if he hadn’t heeded his warning because he didn’t understand hand signals or if he was too fucking stubborn or stupid to listen. Either way he was annoyed. “Hey, fellas,” he grunted out through his fake smile.

The short middle-aged one in the middle holding the pitcher, smiled wide and honest even as his tone was mocking. “Mickey, boy, been a few months. We were starting to worry.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you were checking the gutters every day,” he shot back, trying to maintain the casual tone even as he felt his heart rate pick up, his core swaying from side to side nervously.

“Well, have a seat, man,” one of the men gestured toward the empty chairs, and Mickey nodded, offering another gritted-tooth smile, and sat down, looking up at an oddly placid-faced Ian still standing next to him.

“And your friend?” the older, center man spoke again.

Mickey nudged the chair next to him, on the outside of the table, and glanced up at Ian meaningfully. “This is Martin,” he said slowly, eyes fixed on Ian to make sure the point came across.

“Martin” sat down next to Mickey and nodded in greeting. Well, at least he remembered the “no smiling rule.”

“The hell is he?” a younger kid on the other end, who’d sprouted pimples on his face like a forest since the last time Mickey had seen him, spoke up in an aggressive tone.

“Old friend. He’s cool.” Mickey kept his face casual as he reached for the pint and an empty glass at the center of the table to serve himself, but his tone left no room for argument.

“My cousins,” he murmured, and Ian’s face changed, his eyes lingering on Mickey even as he listed off their names, “Archie at the end, Pete, Ron, my uncle Joe, and Phil. Haven’t seen them in a while.”

“Yeah, you know we could have used you, recently. Your dad and I dealt with these perverts downtown last night, we messed them up in the street and they stumbled off, but we think we know where they live. These fellas living together, right in front of this fucking school. You busy today?”

“Just stopping by for a drink, but later I have to--” Mickey started to say.

Billy piped up from the other end of the bar, voice unsteady but cheerful. “Didn’t you come in asking me for the news, though, Mickey? Doesn’t that mean you’re on a case?” The bartender’s face had this gleam of hope in it, now, and Mickey realized that he was using this as a down payment, trading information on Mickey for the good graces of the men who’d slapped him up maybe an hour earlier.

Phil’s voice was curious but not suspicious, at least not yet. “A case, eh? Anything we should know about?”

“Looking for a missing friend of mine,” Mickey relented, shooting as pants-shitting-worthy a look as he could manage in the direction of the bartender, who was now visibly torn between celebrating his small victory and cowering in the unsaid promises clenching and unclenching in Mickey’s fists.

“You know we miss you, right? Damn shame you decided to go legit,” Mickey’s uncle said.

“Trust me, Joe, what I do can’t be called ‘legit.’” That much was true, anyway. It wasn’t like Mickey’s license was real, at least.

“Well. Legit-er, anyway. What made you do that, huh? Got too much for you?”

“Something like that,” he said with a shrug, turning to look at Ian, who was quietly observing him like he was filing away information. He felt like Ian could see everything that happened without Mickey telling him, could see the years Mickey had kept the truth of himself coiled up tight inside him like a snake, could see how Mickey had waited and watched for any sign in his father’s eyes that he knew what he was, could see how Mickey had stood above bleeding bodies of boys who had loved boys, boys his father hated. He spoke again anyway, added on to the list Ian was storing away, as though his tongue was detached from his brain, and from his heart, from everything that was screaming at him to stop giving this kid ammo. “Dad doesn’t need me around anyway with you schmucks at work for him.”

And Mickey hated that he thought he could spot pity in Ian’s eyes, too. _Yes, this is my family. Yes, this is my life_ , Mickey wanted to shout at Ian. _Aren’t you so happy you get to see me like this? Aren’t you glad you get to see me squirm and you get to be safe?_ The boy beside him held himself with the confidence of an unbruised soldier, and now he knew that Mickey had been bruised before he had ever learned to fight. It made him want to scream at the unfairness, but the other part of him, the scarier part, wanted to clutch at Ian’s side and hold him up like a shield, like a torch waving away the unspoken threats he saw in his cousins’ eyes.

 _Stupid_. They had no clue what Mickey was. Ian could only be danger to him, not his safety.

“Who’s your friend?” Archie interrupted him.

“I told you already, his name is Martin,” Mickey grunted out defensively.

“No, not him, the missing one. The guy you’re looking for.”

“His name’s Fred. You wouldn’t know him.”

“How do you know I wouldn’t know?” Archie asked. “I know a lot of people, bud, you don’t know who I know.”

“Calm down, Arch,” Phil said, pushing a drink his way. “Maybe we could help, kid. You wanna tell us some more? When’d you last see him?”

Mickey considered, wiping the side of his mouth with his thumb. His cousins were dumb as dirt, dumb enough not to know who Fred was related to, at least, but they were still running in circles Mickey could only dip his feet in nowadays. Maybe they’d caught onto something without even realizing it. “That Thompson library, couple weeks ago,” he finally said, naming the place from memory of the few times he’d glanced at X’s dossier.

Ron coughed out a laugh. “The fucking _library_?”

“Eh, I gotta do research for my job, don’t I? I ain’t illiterate,” Mickey shot back, nerves on the back of his neck prickling with unease.

Pete downed his glass, cleared his throat, and stood up. “See ya, fellas, I gotta get to work,” he said, the first words he’d said since Mickey and “Martin” had sat down.

Joe picked at his teeth with his nails. “Sorry, kid, I don’t think I can help. Maybe if you stopped by this afternoon…”

Mickey shook his head. “Nah, sorry, Joe, I really can’t. I’ve already spent more time here than I should have. Thanks for the drink,” he said, nudging Ian’s shoulder as he stood up. “See you,” he threw over his shoulder, trying not to walk too fast on his way out.

“Well, that was a fucking bust. Sorry for wasting your time, man,” Mickey said once they were a safe distance away from the bar, avoiding Ian’s eyes.

“It’s okay. I figured it wouldn’t be an all-at-once thing. We can try again tomorrow.”

“No, look, it’s fine. This is what I do. I’m used to finding this shit out myself, and I don’t know if I can…” He cut himself off, hating that when he looked up Ian seemed as determined as ever.

“Work with somebody else? Look, I’ll stay out of your way, just like I did in there. I don’t have to talk, I’ll just listen,” Ian said, his tone unreasonably reasonable, as if he didn’t see something fucking humiliating for Mickey.

“Nah, look, that ain’t it. The people I talk to don’t follow basic human logic. It doesn’t matter what you do. I can’t guarantee that they won’t….” Mickey trailed off, frustrated, deferring his explanation to suck on a smoke instead because he knew the next words out of his mouth were going to be “hurt you” and he wasn’t going to stand for that, not today.

Ian looked amused. “You think I’m not used to dealing with men whose morals aren’t in check? You remember where I work, right?”

“Look, no, it’s different, trust me, they don’t need a reason, if they just want to beat the shit out of you, they will, they don’t need to know that you’re---”

“Listen, I’ve handled men like that before. I know what I’m doing, Mick.”

Mickey ignored the warmth that pooled in his core at the nickname. “Ian, I believe that you can wink your way of sticky situations with the old men at that club, believe me. I know you got that down, and you can wave the gun at drunks who push their luck, but this is different, and I don’t want you to get—”

Mickey was committed to finishing the sentence this time, weakness be damned, but he didn’t know whether he got it all out, cut off by the sensation of a fist flying into his ear, Ian’s face falling out of frame as he fell over under the shock of the punch. Mickey took a second to stumble back to his feet, swinging a punch back into the tall stranger in front of him, but as soon as it landed his arms were pulled back by another assailant, twisting them painfully. He kicked his legs frantically, struggling, but it was no good. His coat was torn from his body, a ripping sound cutting through the air just as his other ear was hit, this time with the hard barrel of a gun, cold against his skin. The gun made another impact, this time against his jaw, not as hard, but it was enough to keep him down as another pair of legs kicked into his own, and Mickey tried to crawl his way to the man rifling through his coat, checking his pockets for his papers, but another pair of hands lifted him from the ground only to punch him back down again. Mickey stayed still, curled on his side, the pose familiar, almost comforting, as he bent his knees to his chest to make himself small. _Just like coming home_ , he thought, as he tasted blood in his throat. _Just like giving up, like always._ He felt himself slipping, falling into something warm and comfortable like tossing himself onto a bed, but the perfect clarity of a gunshot jolted him back from it, back into the moment. _Ian. Ian is still here._ He pushed on his elbow, trying to balance his head high enough to look around, wincing at the feel of the pavement into his skin, but he could only see three pairs of feet, the shoes unfamiliar, taking off into a run away from him, his coat trailing behind one like a cape.

Mickey blinked rapidly, sweat and blood stinging his eyes, his breath rattling in his ribs sounding as loud as the steps of an army, even as Mickey could still detect in the distance the noise of three sets of feet fading away. He felt a hand wrap around his neck and Mickey swallowed hard, trying to will his limbs to life before its owner could squeeze the life out of him, but Ian’s red hair came into sight as his head was cradled upward. “Mickey, _Mickey_.” Mickey shook his head, his brain telling his legs and torso to straighten up, his limbs flailing about ineffectively before Ian’s face as he knelt in front of Mickey came into frame, his other hand busy tucking a gun into the waistband of his pants before coming to splay on Mickey’s lower back, helping to yank him upright.

Ian spat out the blood in his mouth and grasped Mickey’s jaw in his hands firmly. “Hey. Hey. Look at me. We got to get out of here. Can you walk? Can you move? Mickey, hey.”

“Where the fuck---how did you—”

“Remember when you asked me if I’d hit a man with my gun before?”

Mickey had just enough in him to nod.

“Yeah, well, I have. More than once. Come on, let’s get you back to mine, then we can talk about this.”

He sifted in and out of static-grey fog on the walk home. Mickey could remember certain lampposts, signs, curious faces staring at his bloodied face, and he could remember Ian jostling at his shoulder, “Hey, hey, awake.” He remembered busting his ankle against a step of Ian’s stoop, shooting pain up his leg that shocked him into coherence for long enough to get inside Ian’s apartment.

He was making his way to full consciousness again, even half-slumped over in a chair, when he felt a cool towel press against his face, could see Ian’s concerned face as he arranged it for a second before walking to the other side of the room. “You don’t have to tend to me like a nurse. I’ve gotten my fair share of bloody noses before,” Mickey muttered around the blood in his mouth and the lump in this throat, but Ian didn’t answer.

“It was fucking Pete,” Mickey mumbled. “He got up early. He knew what we were talking about and reported that we were looking for Fred. Stupid. So stupid.”

But Ian was pacing, frantic, and that comment seemed to only make things worse, his hands knocking over bottles from the medicine cabinet as he scrambled for bandages.

His hands were still shaking when he returned to kneel over Mickey, pressing the towel harder against the open wound to stem the bleeding while wiping at the cuts on his chin, all of him concentrated in the frenzied movements of his fingers for a few minutes, before he slowed, before he opened his mouth to speak. “I used to do what those guys did today. Used to hurt people. I was good at it. Great, even.”

Mickey felt like stones were being piled up, one by one, with slow, heavy progression into his stomach, starting at the base of his spine and building toward his throat, making it harder for him to sit up, making it harder for him to talk. He managed it anyway. “What?”

“A hired gun. That used to be me, a few years ago. I---“

 _I knew you were dangerous_ , Mickey thought to himself, forcing away the images that returned unbidden, images of Ian holding up a shield, Ian holding up a torch, Ian holding up _Mickey._ “Did you do it in this city?”

“Yes.”

“Did you use to do it for those men?”

“…I’m not sure.”

That burned Mickey’s gut in anger. “How? _How_ can you possibly not know? Selective memory loss?”

“I’m not sure because I don’t know who those men today were! I didn’t recognize their faces. But, _yes_ , I used to work for a family that used to work for City Hall. They probably still do. But I don’t know. I haven’t been in that business for a long time now. It got too much and I got set up at the club.”

Mickey leaned back, a thousand questions whirling in his head, so fast he thought he was going to be sick, so he just shut his eyes for a moment and concentrated on keeping the bile threatening to rise down. The silence was good. He could work with that, could go on feeling numb to what the fuck he just learned for however long he could.

Ian broke it.

“I shouldn’t have told you that phrase. Ninth Circle. Shouldn’t have kept you on the chase or given you anything to think you could figure it out and get you in more danger. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

“Why _did_ you tell me?”

Ian didn’t answer right away. “I lied to you. I said most of Freddie’s shit was gibberish. But the truth is I recognized most of it. I knew he was telling the truth, knew who a lot of the men he described as following him were, from before. That phrase, that name, that was like. That was the thing I didn’t recognize. Thought maybe you would. I should’ve known better.”

“Did you know Freddie from before? Is that why--” Mickey started to ask, but Ian cut him off.

“I saw him once or twice, maybe, around the mayor, when he was still a kid, before I quit. I didn’t know him.”

“Bullshit.”

Ian was holding his hat in his lap, Mickey realized. He must have picked it up from the ground outside of the bar, when he’d wrenched Mickey to his feet. It had a little bit of Mickey’s blood on the inside, but Ian was running his fingers along the rim gently, thoughtfully, looking down at the hat instead of him. “I’m telling you the truth. He didn’t know me. He didn’t recognize me. I didn’t even make the connection right away.”

“So, it’s just a big coincidence, then, huh? Is that it?”

Ian sighed, and his face looked helpless. It made him look younger, look like the kid he probably was under all the personas he’d taken on: gangster, dancer, man who bewitched others with every twitch of his hips or lips, man who was an extension of his gun. Right now he was none of them, fingers grasping at Mickey’s hat like a lifeline. “Look, I know how it looks to you. I know it looks like I’m playing you, but I’m not, I swear. I swear I wanted to tell you—”

“So why _didn’t_ you tell me?” Mickey could think of a thousand reasons why, knew those reasons would have been more than enough for Mickey not to tell Ian if their situations were reversed, knew he didn’t have the right to be so angry, but it rose up within him anyway, and he was too exhausted to fight it.

“I figured you would think…you said you trusted me.” Ian’s voice was low, soft.

Mickey flushed, wanting to deny it, wanting to tell him it didn’t matter, that he’d expected it, that he had been bracing himself for this moment ever since they met, but he didn’t have the voice for that, looking across at Ian’s wide, pleading eyes. He finally said, “I only said that a few hours ag—” as though that somehow made it less real.

“Yeah, but I felt it before then. I felt it right when we met.” Ian paused, throat working. “I felt it right when I saw you. It’s not something I’m used to. I didn’t want that to go away.”

Ian’s face was so fucking honest, so open, that it hurt to look at. So Mickey didn’t. “Too fucking late,” he grunted, whether at Ian or himself, he didn’t know. Mickey stood up, quickly enough that he swayed on his feet and Ian’s hands came out to steady him, but he knocked them away, ignoring how hard his legs stumbled, unsteady beneath him, ignoring how he’d sent his own hat flying from Ian’s grasp, trudging his way across the apartment so painfully that it felt like he was crossing the desert. He turned his head just enough when he reached the door, just enough to see Ian bend to pick up his hat, and the sight made Mickey open the door and push himself out into the cold wet night even faster.

***

Mickey was drenched when he got home. From rain or sweat or blood, he didn’t even know, and he didn’t bother checking, launching himself onto his bed, rubbing his head into the sheets like he could make the night disappear. Sleep, when it came, did not oblige him in that pursuit.

He was in bed, his bed, and his head pounded still, but he was warm, and when he looked to the source of his heat, he saw Ian next to him, naked except for Mickey’s hat on his head.

“You know you look dumb in that, right?” Mickey said, poking Ian’s side playfully, but Ian didn’t squirm away, ticklish, like Mickey would have. He leaned into the touch, and bent down to press his lips against Mickey’s, warm and chaste.

“You told me I could have it,” Ian whispered to him, hand coming up to cup Mickey’s cheek. “You gonna take it back?”

Mickey shook his head, his own hand reaching around Ian’s neck to pull him back for another kiss, open and wet this time. “I never take anything back.”

Mickey could smell his own blood on Ian’s hair, and he tugged on the red strand closest to him, as if it were proof. “See? _Yours_.” Mickey closed his eyes and fell into Ian’s mouth, Ian’s body, warm and wrapped around him tight like a grave.

He woke up shivering

***

It was night again. Which night, Mickey didn’t know. He’d spent a couple days in bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, ignoring the ring of his phone, smoking cigarettes until the burn of his throat punished for him for it. And now he paced outside the club, the back alley exit that Ian had come out of the first night, directly across the street from the bush Mickey was half-huddling in. He’d follow the guy, he told himself. Just follow him to see what he’s up to, who he’s reporting to, what he’s saying. If he’s saying anything about Mickey.

Dancers drifted out in pairs, some men, some women, some both together, clutching at each other’s elbows as they swayed like poles in a flood. Ian came out alone that one time, Mickey remembered. He wondered if that was tactical, if Ian avoided making friends where he worked, if he stayed off the radar as much as possible. If he did that so he could collect information without anyone knowing, so he could report back to whatever mob people he was still getting money from. Or if he kept himself alone because he felt safer that way, if Ian was always questioning if every figure in his life was just another man with a gun waiting to force his present to collide with his past.

Mickey wondered if he had been the one exception.

He chewed on his thumb, watching that door, biting his teeth hard and hard and harder into his skin until he tore some of it off, spitting it into the bush a second later. His eyes focused so hard on that door that they teared up from lack of blinking, his temples aching, his head pounding as much as it had a few days ago—all that effort on the little brown rectangle across the street, Mickey repeating over and over again in his mind, “Come out. Come out. Come out. Come on, come out, come out, fucker, come out,” not noticing when he’d stopped thinking it and started whispering it instead, watching that door so intently.

He watched that door with so much focus that he didn’t notice the three men until they were right in front of him, two of them waving guns, another with a bat.

Mickey didn’t even have enough time to put his fists up before one collided into the side of his face. He didn’t go down as easily this time, even with his injuries, but he was being hit so fast he didn’t have time to reach for his gun, and he toppled over, scrabbling for his pockets as his torso was straddled and pinned down.

“Where the fuck is he?” a blond man spat between spaced-out teeth.

“Fucking who?” Ian’s face flashed in Mickey’s mind, his head pounding, his throat feeling tight, like he couldn’t fucking breathe, at the thought. Were these men here because they knew about Ian or were they here because they followed Mickey? Either way, his earlier litany reversed itself immediately. _Stay inside, Ian, stay inside, stay inside, stay inside, stay inside._

“The _son_ , where is he?”

So they were here for Freddie, then. “I don’t fucking know!” The first man got off him, but as soon as he tried to get to his feet he was shoved back down again. The bat connected, not as hard as Mickey was expecting, into his side before it was tossed away, and the second man bent over and grabbed Mickey’s collar for leverage before launching his fists into his face. When he pulled back, Mickey’s sight was still clear enough to make out his features, and he almost wanted to laugh. “Mole-Face,” Mickey thought to himself. So Ian hadn’t lied to him about that part, at least.

“You have two days. Do your job. Deliver him,” a third voice said from behind him. Mickey shut his eyes, bracing himself for another impact, but the weight lifted off his body, and when he opened his eyes, the street was empty, even as he could still hear them retreating. Mickey waited, in the same prostrate position, until the sound was almost inaudible, before stumbling to his feet, tearing up his palm by bracing himself on the thorny bush.

 _Do your job_ , the guy had said. _Okay, then_ , Mickey thought to himself. _Right now, my job is to follow you._

He hugged the fence, going as slow as possible, trying to stay as steady as possible, to reduce his noise. He remembered just a few nights ago, going this way with Ian, running this way with Ian, freely and loudly down the empty street. The thought made him stronger.

Strong enough to get to a point where their voices came in loud and clear, unmoving. Mickey hugged a building, inching along the wall, his wounds stinging at him as the brick pressed into his sore back, but he ignored them, keeping his senses as alert as possible, looking in every direction. Parking lot. They had to be in the parking lot.

He crept along, ducking his head around the corner to see four dark figures huddled together. Their backs were turned to him, so he dove inside the lot, landing behind the first car he saw. Mickey curled up in a ball, as small as he could make himself, to sit out of sight behind the car. He heard voices, a chorus of deep tones saying vulgar words, and one voice among them somewhat higher-pitched, speaking in short, clipped, annoyed sentences. He couldn’t quite make it out, until they got close enough that Mickey’s entire body tensed, close enough that they were passing by the car. “I told you to get it done, so you’re going to get it done. Believe me, you don’t want…” The voice trailed off as the men walked past him, out of the parking lot and further down the road, and Mickey should have felt relief at that, that the way might be open now for him to walk without hiding, but he couldn’t. Some dark feeling was slinking up his spinal column, slow but deliberate, as if his body already knew the truth before the nerves in his brain caught up. He crawled some more on his broken hands, wincing at the feel of the pavement pressing into the skin, until he could check around the corner of the car to see if the road was empty. It was, but that wasn’t what caught his eye right away. Instead, the plate on the back of the car drew his eye first, because Mickey had seen it before, had watched it pull out of the parking lot of his office, had followed it without being seen. It was easy, keeping an eye on the letters: “XXXXX0.”

Mr. X’s car. Mickey wanted to break in a run at the thought, but he stumbled to his feet instead, and used as much of his energy that could be funneled into physical movement into walking straight and steady. The other reserve of energy went wild in his brain.

The men after Freddie were hired by X, too. So that meant…

Mickey wasn’t hired to save the kid. Mickey was hired to hand him to the lions. The realization pooled, ice-cold, from his feet to his head, like sweat in reverse, and he felt stupid for even being surprised. He never questioned where the blood would fall after his work was done before. What changed things now?

He didn’t realize where he was walking until he’d already arrived. It was as if his legs moved of their own volition toward Ian’s, without the slightest contribution from his brain. Stupid. Stupid. What if he had been spotted? What if he had been followed? He was taking them straight to another place they could find Ian, where they could hurt him.

But Mickey’s thoughts were too tired now to even fight it, and he surrendered to what his body wanted, needed, even, knocking on the door, feeling his stomach drop out in despair after a few seconds when he didn’t hear any noise within, conscious of how much blood was running down his forehead and into his eyes. But then he saw Ian’s unmistakable silhouette through the fogged-over window, and he felt his body tense up again, in a different way this time. The only thing that would be worse than Ian being gone would be having Ian turn him away.

The door opened just wide enough to show one-half of Ian’s face. He seemed unhurt. Looked unhurt. Some muscles unclenched in Mickey’s body just as the thought. “Mickey, what are you—”

“Can I come in?” he coughed out. Ian nodded quickly, pulling back the door with one hand and using the other to press against Mickey’s back, pulling him inside.

He was put in the same chair as before, and he could see his own hat on the couch across from him, but it was put out of sight a moment later when Ian came back, again with the towels and bandages and water and soap. Mickey closed his eyes, allowed his shoulders to sink, and gave himself over to Ian’s touch.

Ian’s hands felt like heaven against his skin, like he was wiping away more than caked blood and dirt. Like he was taking away armor that’d been calcified for years on Mickey’s body, nimbly slipping it off of Mickey with his gentle touch. Mickey should have felt exposed, or weak, or scared, for feeling so small and open under his hands. He felt grateful, and he couldn’t stop the words now even if he wanted to. But he didn’t _want_ to stop them. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry for what I said. And for storming out like a little bitch. It was dumb.”

Ian’s smile was warm. “I think you’ve paid enough for it.”

Mickey huffed out a laugh. “Yeah.” Ian’s eyes were narrowed in focus, his forehead wrinkled as he concentrated on attending to the cuts on Mickey’s face.

“Yeah, you really got the shit kicked out of you, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. _Again_.”

“Think of it as another learning experience,” Ian said, reaching for the bandages to cover his torn-open skin.

“Pretty sure I’ve had enough of those.”

Ian’s hands paused on his chin, and his eyes turned serious. “You _have_ , haven’t you?” he murmured, thumb circling his chin for a moment, and Mickey knew he wasn’t just talking about the other day, knew he was talking about the things he had read in Mickey’s eyes in that bar.

Mickey sighed, long and low, and it hurt a little bit more than it did that morning. “Need to solve this fucking case before all my bones break.”

Ian sat back on his heels but kept a hand on Mickey’s face, gently dabbing at a cut on his forehead with the towel before trailing a finger down his cheek. “Can I—can I keep helping you with that? The case?”

Mickey didn’t answer right away, holding Ian’s gaze. “Why’d you ask to come with me before, that first night? When you had to know it was dangerous, working where you’ve worked, doing what you’ve done. You had to know what was gonna happen.”

“That’s exactly _why_ I did it,” Ian said, as though the answer should be obvious. “I knew all that. _You_ didn’t. I needed to make sure you—” He cut himself short, shaking his head, lifting up the side of Mickey’s shirt to examine the burgeoning bruises over his ribcage, his long, thin fingers clinging to Mickey’s flesh overlong like water droplets on leaves after rain. They were still touching him when he heard Ian mutter, “were protected.” Ian’s face hardened, and his fingers pulled away, tugged the shirt back down, leaving Mickey feeling colder than before.

“You helpin’ me because I remind you of him? All battered and useless and shit?”

“What?”

Mickey sighed, ignoring how that made his ribs sing with pain, and elaborated. “Do you look at me and see him? Gay as fuck and running from my family because they’d kill me if it got out?”

“Do you look at him and see _yourself_?” Ian shot back. “Believe it or not there’s more to a person than how many times they’ve gotten beaten up, or how many dark coats are after them. If you see yourself in Freddie, that’s your problem, not mine.”

“Jesus, slow your roll. I was just asking. Don’t have to get pissy about it.”

Ian exhaled sharply and rolled his eyes before refocusing on Mickey, a steady glare. “You think you’re here because you remind me of Freddie, and by tending you, I’m tending _him_ , or something? Some projection shit like that?” He paused, but Mickey didn’t know how to answer, or even if Ian wanted him to, and Ian eventually plowed ahead. “I cared about Freddie. Worried about him. But I did that because he…because he reminded me of somebody else. Someone I knew once. Gone now, too. And no, nobody I fucked and nobody I wanted to fuck, before you even form that thought, you single-minded dickbrain. You don’t remind me of Freddie, and you don’t remind me of the person he was like.” Ian sat down on the sofa across from him, ringing the wet bloodied towel in his fists. “You’re here….you’re here because you don’t remind me of _anybody_. When I look at you, I feel like I know you, know exactly who you are, but it isn’t because I’ve known you before in a different skin or with a different name. Understand? I feel like I know you but I feel like there’s only one of you. That’s….” He trailed off, frowning to himself.

Mickey chewed his bottom lip for a minute, watching Ian watch the floor. “All those men at the club….” Mickey started out uncertainly, unsure of where his sentence wanted to go.

Ian half-smiled grimly, not looking up. “All the men at the club think they need me to be a hundred different things for them from one moment to the next. Their young lover, their boyfriend, their son, their daddy, themselves. They look at me and they see all of that, because I’m good at doing it for them. And I’m good at doing it for them because what those men don’t know is they’re exactly the same as everyone else, every other man in the club, every other man in the city. Like, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, a thousand ways out, and they come to me begging to make them more reflections, when they don’t even know who the original is.” Ian swallowed. “It gets old.”

“And you think I know who I am?” _Is that what makes me different_ , Mickey wondered.

Ian grinned then, wide and real. “Hell fucking no, you have no clue who you are. And you probably want someone to point it out for you, too, but…..it’s okay, somehow.” Ian shrugged, like what he said wasn’t that big of a deal, like “okay” shouldn’t be huge in this godforsaken place.

“Could it be because….” Mickey felt his heart pound against his chest, every breath like a knife between his aching ribs. He could blame the pain on the injuries, if he wanted to. He didn’t want to. “Could it be because I want you?” Ian looked up at that, and Mickey could see his eyes full of tears, and maybe if he were somebody else, that would have struck Mickey as odd, or pathetic, or terrifying. Well, it was a little terrifying, sure. But for right now if Mickey knew anything it was that it was nothing he couldn’t handle.

He got to his feet and walked over to Ian, reaching down tentatively to cup his cheeks in his hands, fingers stroking behind his ears. “Because I want _you_.” A few tears fell, quickly skidding under Mickey’s palms, but he wasn’t deterred, stooping down on his knees to drop kisses against Ian’s hair and forehead and lips. “Just you.” And maybe somewhere in the back of Mickey’s brain, deep inside the wordless parts of him, there was something aching to say that what he meant was that he wanted flesh-and-bone Ian, blood-and-tears Ian, weeping and worrying and aching and smiling Ian, behind the masks, behind the performances, to the vulgarly vulnerable core of him, with all of the pain that came with that. But he slipped his tongue inarticulately against Ian’s instead, caught his sob in his mouth, and thought that Ian heard all that anyway, even if he couldn’t say it.

“Mickey,” Ian murmured against his mouth, heads reaching around his neck. “Mickey, Mickey, Mickey.” He’d lifted the both of them to their feet somehow, and Mickey was vaguely conscious that Ian was steering them into another room, but mostly he couldn’t see or smell or taste or think anything that wasn’t Ian’s lips, Ian’s tongue, Ian’s wet warmth swallowing his world whole.

Ian had him pressed against his bed before he pulled away from his mouth, only going right back in to press his lips against Mickey’s wounds, Mickey’s cuts and Mickey’s purpling and yellowing bruises. “You’re a mess,” he heard Ian whisper against his skin between kisses. Mickey threaded his fingers into Ian’s hair, brushing against that red. He looked like fire in his hands, _felt_ like fire against his skin as he slipped off the rest of his clothes, and yet Mickey’s fingers pet him gentler than he thought he knew how, and Mickey thought to himself that nothing could burn him more than this flame dying out.

"I want you, I want you..." Mickey swallowed, tasted the words he was going to say already, "inside me." Ian kissed him so hard Mickey thought he might pass out.

The boy, the boy glowing in the moonlight as he thrust like some Greek god made from marble, the boy made of mystery, the boy made of smoke was looking down at Mickey like he knew every one of his secrets, like he could taste each one in the curve of Mickey's smile against his lips.

Ian was drenched with sweat, burning against him as he moved, making small, pitiful noises, tongue poking out as he wetly kissed the line of Mickey’s jaw. All flesh, all inelegant un-mysterious mass, and Mickey licked at his neck and tasted the world.

This boy and his smile like a knife. But with Ian inside him, Mickey didn't feel like meat, didn't feel cut open and stripped apart and sliced and diced for sale. For once his body didn’t feel like a crime scene without the tape. Mickey arched up, dragging him deeper, and marveled somehow, that his body felt like a fuse, felt like soft gunpowder sifting between Ian's fingers. Ready. Set. Boom.

"Ugh, fuck," he groaned out, exploding.

After, he trailed his fingers up and down Ian’s ribs, smiling at the shivers he caused, petting over the fuzz on his arms. “Who was he? The person Freddie reminded you of?”

“It wasn’t—not…..” Ian, frustrated, shook his head. “My mother. It was my mother.” Ian inhaled, sharp-sounding, and the noise made Mickey’s nerves stand on edge. “And me.” Ian’s face distorted, eyes shut and forehead furrowed in concentration, and Mickey knew he was trying hard not to cry again. He leaned forward some more, brushing a hand against Ian’s face like he could smooth out the wrinkles himself.

“Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Ian shook his head, sniffed, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “It’s not. It’s really not.” He propped his head up on his elbow, looking down at Mickey intently, seriously. “But it could be.”

“What do you mean?”

"We can _go_ , you know, away.”

"Go where?"

"Anywhere. Anywhere that isn't here." The pupils in Ian’s eyes had grown in the dim light of his room, huge black pools of hope now that tempted Mickey into saying, “Yes, yes, okay,” and diving headfirst into oblivion.

Instead he said, “Not that simple."

"It _is_ that simple,” Ian insisted, voice irritated.

Nothing is ever that simple, Mickey wanted to say, but didn't. Ian kept going anyway. "Could get out right now if you wanted. Go somewhere the sun shines once in a while. Somewhere there ain't gunshots in every alley every day of the week."

A thousand things came to Mickey’s mind, but he just said, "If I wasn't a detective, the fuck would I do?"

Ian shrugged. "Make yourself something new."

"'Something new.' Like it's just that easy, huh?"

"It is if you want it to be." Ian's eyes were wide, solemn.

Mickey shifted on his side, pushing his hand out to tangle his fingers with Ian’s. “Is that what you think you do?”

“I _know_ I do. It’s like what you said the other night, about how you weren’t expecting me to have such good form with the gun. Wide-eyed ingénue one moment, thug with a gun the next. I can do both, because I’m neither. It’s easier than it looks.”

Mickey pressed his mouth against Ian’s, feeling his tongue press against the broken skin on bottom lip, stinging and then soothing. He pulled away, whispering into his mouth. “You think you’re not real, don’t you?” Mickey licked into the open space the second Ian opened his mouth to respond, intending to kiss him speechless, but Ian still had words when he pulled away.

“It’s not a bad thing. I’m good at it. I get to be everything because I’m nothing.”

“Yeah?” Mickey gripped his fingers hard, purposefully harder than could be comfortable. “You feel,” he interrupted himself to kiss Ian, more softly than he intended, “very fucking real to me.”

Ian clutched back at Mickey, free fingers slipping painfully against his scalp, teeth snagging at Mickey’s bottom lip before soothing it with his tongue, holding it between his two lips and pulling at it gently like he wanted to protect it for him, barely releasing it enough to speak. When he did, it was a rough, wet whisper. “So if you’re you, and I’m me, and that’s the end of it, then what do we do? Wait for them to come for you? Wait to be gunned down? What do we do? Find Fred? Find what he knows? Tell the world, whatever it is they don’t want us to know?”

“Nobody would believe us. No matter what it is, even if it’s just that Fred exists, period, that there’s some queer junkie kid shooting the city’s money up his arms, nobody’s gonna look at us and think we’re worth saving,” Mickey thought out loud.

“We could try anyway.”

Mickey tried to scoff at him, but it came out affectionate, fond. “I told you, I told you, you’re so fucking _honest_ , you dumbass,” he muttered, kissing Ian’s nose and cheeks and lips. He pulled back, looking at Ian all flushed and panting, and smiling.

"Okay,” Mickey relented. “We'll try. But where do we look?"

"Where's somewhere that we know he's been before, that you haven't looked?" Mickey thought about the pictures in the dossier. "Somewhere he could have seen things." It sounded like a rhetorical question.

Mickey could read the idea in Ian’s eyes. "Oh, that's stupid. That's so stupid." 

"Then it's perfect for us, right?" Ian answered without hesitation, his voice at once teasing and serious. Mickey shot him a look, sighing, but he didn’t fight it.

“Bring your gun,” Mickey told him, blindly grabbing for his pants in the dark. “And hold on to it.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve got my own.”

***

The mayor’s mansion was dark tonight. Mickey had expected guards. He’d expected men with guns waiting at every entrance. Instead it was like a graveyard, like a big white mausoleum on the skirts of the city. He picked the lock of the back door with ease, Ian standing behind him with his gun ready.

They stepped inside, checking each room, Mickey’s muscles drawn so tight he was afraid he was going to start trembling, but he didn’t. He felt….ready.

They went through each room, each meticulously cleaned room on the main level one by one, verifying its emptiness, before going upstairs and doing the same. Ian had been here before, more than once, and knew the layout. Every room was neat. Adult-looking. All but one.

“Guest room,” Ian mumbled when they entered one on the far end of the hallway, but pointed toward the personalized objects on the desk and walls, tucking his gun away to start rifling through them quickly. “Permanent or semi-permanent guest, it looks like.”

On the desk, a worn baseball with illegible signatures, stitches threatening to burst; old coffee cups that had gone unwashed for months; scattered drawings, some abstract, some of long beautiful faceless bodies, all signed with the single initial “F.”

Mickey flipped through the drawings and peeked into the closest before looking under the bed, He pulled out a familiar-looking magazine. “Didn’t bother to hide his porno away that well.”

Naked men were on the cover, but after thumbing through a few pages of additional pictures, Mickey flipped to a page of writing, rushed and cramped and panicked-looking. “Oh, _fuck_ , he was smart. Knew exactly where his daddy wouldn’t look.”

“What, what did you find?” Ian abandoned searching through the drawers on the other side of the room and was by Mickey’s side in a second.

“Names,” Mickey said, holding the first page of writing out for Ian to take. “Mob men who’ve been in the papers. Mob men who’ve gotten out of jail early. Mob men on the payroll.”

Ian swore under his breath as he picked up papers underneath Fred’s writing. “Obituaries.”

“Whose?”

“Some criminals with ties to the names on the list you read, journalists, rival politician’s son.” Mickey heard Ian swallow, turned to look at him, his skin gone all gray. “I remember that last one.”

He wanted to hold Ian, crush him to his chest, ask him the details, tell him it didn’t matter, but this was his own burden to bear, and Mickey wouldn’t insult him by trying to wrest it off his back. Mickey flipped to the last non-porn scrap in the folder, reading aloud. “‘The men who work for my dad. I call it the Ninth Circle. It’s stupid and no one knows understands it but me, but ever since I learned who I was, what I’ve come from, what he’s done, I’ve been in a hell so dark I don’t think I’ll ever get out.’”

He glanced over to see Ian crying, but it was not the full-bodied surrender of earlier; but a single tear cracking down a face of stone.

“You know what he means?” Mickey asked, gesturing to the writing. “What he means by ‘what he’s done?’”

“Not…specifically, no,” Ian said. “But does it matter?” Mickey wanted to say, yes, yes it does, it matters what happened, it matters what bodies fell, when they did, where they were now, what they did to “deserve” it. It matters. He knew it did. But Ian turned to him, eyes full of tears, and he knew that Ian knew that, didn’t need to be told that. He didn’t have to ask why he was crying, either. It was _because_ it mattered, and because they would never know.

Mickey folded the paper up neatly, carefully, more carefully than he had ever done anything, and placed it into his pocket. “No, it doesn’t. We have enough here. We have what we need. Come on.” He put his hand on Ian’s shoulder, and Ian nodded, turned to walk out, walking faster than Mickey expected, like he wanted nothing more than to get out and never look back, turning the corner before Mickey.

Mickey walked through the door to see that face from the papers holding a gun out ahead of him, pointed at Ian, Ian who hadn’t had time to get his gun out. Mickey had his own gun raised in a second.

But the mayor was calm, as if he had expected the intruders, and Ian’s body was between them, right in the line of fire. “Gallagher, right? I remember you.” He gestured Ian to walk forward, walk toward him, shaking the gun with emphasis. Mickey’s insides froze, but Ian did as he was told, walking forward until the mayor yanked him the rest of the way, hugging him against his body and turning the gun against Ian’s head..

The mayor turned to Mickey. “I remember when he was a skinny freckled kid holding a gun as big as his head. Remember that? The Robertson affair? You were there.”

“I was,” Ian’s voice was unwavering, confident, and Mickey loved him for that, loved him more every second that he stood with a gun pressed against his skin while Mickey was trembling, holding the gun up in an unspoken threat.

“So was Fred. And where is he now?” The mayor punctuated his words by squeezing his hand around Ian’s neck, gun barrel pointed hard into his chin.

The meaning was clear. I got rid of my son, my son who knew too much, my son who _was_ too much. What do you think I’m willing to do for you?

Stupid, it was so stupid, it was so stupid. Better if they hadn’t bothered, better to get chased down instead. Better anything, Mickey thought for a moment, palm sweating around the gun, than to go like this, to watch as it happened. And for _what_? For not giving up? For saying they hadn’t betrayed themselves?

But they were on this bloody road no matter what. And Ian wouldn’t be Ian if he didn’t try, if he didn’t believe they could do it.

For a second it was like the mayor wasn’t in the room. Mickey stared back at Ian, long pale column of his neck bared under the gun, breathing hard, looking at Mickey with something like encouragement in his eyes. A flame of a man who’d somehow turned into Mickey’s rock. If it could go one way, maybe it could go the other. Maybe Mickey could catch fire, too.

He would do it. He could say the things that weren’t supposed to be thought. If not to the world, then to the white-toothed sharp-suited man before him with a gun that stood in for the world, all hateful and strong and unknowable. He could say it, maybe because he knew it was his last chance to, or maybe because he thought it wasn’t the end at all. Ready, set. “Was it because he was a fag?”

The mayor stared at him, silent for another moment still, but not calm anymore. His knuckles tightened further onto the gun as the line of his jaw tensed, and he looked at Mickey with a new edge in his eye, some hint of anger or uncertainty or…terror. “What are you talking about?” The mayor’s voice shook. Boom.

“Cut the shit, we know what he was. Did you throw him away and hunt him like a dog because he was a fag?” Mickey’s voice was loud, too loud, but he didn’t bother taming it. It felt good, to yell the word.

The mayor was quiet another moment. “It didn’t help.”

It surprised Mickey that it actually stung, hearing him say that as simply as he did. “Is he alive?”

“Does it matter now?”

“Yes. _Yes_ , it matters. It matters because if he isn’t, then there’s nothing keeping me back from telling everybody all we’ve found out. Publishing the papers your man gave me. There was enough in the original dossier to ruin you politically forever, at the least. It matters. ‘Cause what else is stopping me?”

“Maybe _this_ ,” the mayor grunted, shoving the butt of the gun harder into Ian’s cheek, making him flinch. The mayor’s eyes had hardened at the threat, and Mickey knew that he knew without Mickey having to say it out loud. He had shown his hand. _Queer solidarity,_ Mickey had thought jokingly, not that long ago. Was it still a joke? Was he the punchline?

“You fucking touch him and…”

“I get it. Believe me, you’ve made that much clear. So here’s what’s going to happen. Your boy and I are going to walk out of here. We’re going to leave and you’re going to stay here for as long as it takes us to get off the property. And then you’ll leave and never come back. And we won’t have to worry about this anymore.”

“How do you know I wouldn’t come out with the information I already got?” Mickey shot back, feeling the pressure of the pages in his inner pocket as if they had their own pulse.

“Because I’ll have _him_.” The mayor stuck the gun hard into Ian’s skin again, at that, and Mickey’s entire body went cold. In the space of two seconds, in the space of one, even, he imagined a stretch of months, waiting in silence, waiting alone in his room with a gun trained on the door, a hand on the phone, waiting for a phone call, waiting for some sign of Ian’s voice, waiting with a hand on the papers, while Ian sat naked in the dark somewhere. “I’ll hold onto him, keep him safe for you, and in return you can—”

Ian’s voice interrupted him—“No, Mick. I’ve been here before. He’ll just have his men come, drive me out to an empty space, and get it done right then. Don’t listen to him.”

The gun pressed into Ian’s cheek, and the mayor hissed in his ear, “Shut it, queer,” low enough that it probably wasn’t meant for Mickey’s ears, before pressing the gun against his temple. Ian’s eyes clenched shut, so hard it had to be painful, as if closing them tightly enough would erase the situation before him. Mickey’s fist tightened, staring at Ian’s face, seeing him trying to make himself disappear, make himself into a ball, like a child. Mickey’s fingers tensed.

The shot rang out like a perfect scream, short and sharp and gone in a second, echoed by the crash of the mayor’s limbs to the ground, Ian tripping away from him mindlessly. Mickey reared forward just as Ian reared back, saw the place in the mayor’s side where the blood was gushing out hard and fast onto the nice rug beneath him, saw where his eyes were still gaping as wide as his mouth as he gasped and gasped for air. And it wasn’t enough, somehow. Mickey’s body bent, without thought, to grasp the man’s collar, to crush his fists into his face, to hear the crunch of teeth and bone under his hands, and the noises made his stomach turn, made him want to hurl, but it wasn’t enough to make him stop, until the body beneath him twitched and stilled, and a little beyond that.

Ian’s hands were strong, impossibly real on his shoulders. Mickey was somehow numb and hypersensitive at once, imagining he could feel every line carved into Ian’s palms when they slipped down to touch his own bare skin, to remove the gun from his grasp. Mickey wanted to slip into those cracks like melted ice, sink into his skin, into his permanents marks, forever. He leaned into his touch and opened his mouth to say that, but instead: “I killed the mayor,” Mickey said, dully.

“You did,” Ian confirmed. “But it’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.” He felt Ian’s hand slip into his own, his pulse pounding wildly against Mickey’s skin. “You saved me.”

Mickey felt the hot burn of tears in his eyes, and he blinked rapidly, trying to dispel them, but it was no good. Ian pulled him against his body in a crushing hug, and Mickey was vaguely aware that he was probably getting the mayor’s blood onto Ian, but it felt too good, having his body against Ian’s like this. He couldn’t pull away. “You’re okay,” Mickey murmured against Ian’s neck, half-reverent whisper of disbelief, half-question.

“Yes. You saved me. Again,” Ian said the last word meaningfully, tangling a hand in Mickey’s hair and using the grip to pull his head upward for a kiss. “We’re going to get rid of this and then go. I’m going to clean up in here and then we can go, okay?” Mickey was, for the first time, vaguely grateful that Ian had been a criminal, that he knew what to do with blood and bodies, but Mickey knew those things, too.

“No, I wanna….let me do it. Let me…..”

“You wanna…deal with _him_?”

He nodded, nuzzling into Ian’s neck for a moment. “I need to do it.”

Ian pressed a kiss to the top of his head. “Okay. I’ll help you drag him out to the yard and check the shed. There should be a shovel.”

Mickey would have burned the body if he could. Instead he kicked up a layer of dirt up at his own body, getting into his eyes, shoveling soil over the corpse while Ian was still inside doing God knows what. His muscles burned, then went numb, and he kept going, shoveling dirt on top of dirt and then flattening it with the opposite side of the shovel, smoothing the layer out as best as he could. Not that there was much point. The body would be found soon enough. And so what? What would happen? The ritual of the thing was what counted here.

After a while Mickey became conscious that he was no longer alone, that Ian had finished up at some point and came out to watch him attack the ground with the shovel. Anyone else would have thought Mickey had lost his mind. But Ian knew, just like Ian had always known who Mickey was. Ian knew he wasn’t burying the _mayor_ , not really. He was burying Freddie’s father, and his own father, and Ian’s, and anyone else who had ever broken his skin open. Anyone else who had ever broken open Ian’s. Any other demon they’d defeated, together or apart, the demons of the last few weeks and the ones he knew were yet to come. You don’t kill a demon without a ritual. You don’t kill a demon without mourning for the blood you’ve lost in the process. And plenty blood had been lost here.

But not all. Mickey had torn open a fresh wound on his hand with the shovel, now, and it stung when Ian grabbed it, when Ian took the tool from his hand and replaced it with his own touch. He gripped back as hard as he was able, happy for the pain, for once. He let Ian pull him away from the mound, let him guide him into the car they’d taken and parked down the road, let him hold his hand even as he started the ignition and pulled further away from the mansion. Let him do all that in silence, until they were out of the city, out on open uncertain road, before speaking.

“You, too.”

Ian turned to look at him curiously, his hand giving Mickey an encouraging squeeze. “You said I saved you,” Mickey murmured. Ian swallowed, nodded at him. Ian hadn’t just meant that night, hadn’t just meant saving Ian’s body. And maybe they both knew that, maybe they didn’t need it to be said. But Mickey thought maybe Ian wanted to, anyway, because he answered, “Yeah. You saw me. You saved me.”

Mickey nodded, looked down at Ian’s hand on his, and clasped it with his other hand, brought it to his lips. “You, too. You saw me, too.”

The road opened wider, and as the night faded into morning, Ian rolled down the windows to let in fresh air. “All right, you win. You were right. There _are_ places the sun shines,” Mickey said, feeling the rays of light hit his skin like a dry baptism.

“I _was_ right,” Ian agreed, smug as ever. “You think we could make ourselves new, too?” He glanced over at Mickey, some edge of anxiety in his eyes.

Mickey shook his head. “No. No new us.” He laced their fingers together tighter. “We don’t need to be new,” he said, looking over to see Ian smile, his face somehow even brighter under the sun.

Ian rubbed a few circles onto Mickey’s hand, the motion familiar, like it had happened a thousand times before, and Mickey knew he wanted to feel it a thousand times more. “You can sleep, Mick,” Ian whispered gently. “I’ll wake you up when I find some good food.” Mickey shut his eyes, breathed deep.

The country smelled like blood. Ian’s blood and Mickey’s blood, together. And that was more than enough.


End file.
